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Susan SmithSusan Smith has worked as an editor and writer in the technology industry for over 16 years. As an editor she has been responsible for the launch of a number of technology trade publications, both in print and online. Currently, Susan is the Editor of GISCafe and AECCafe, as well as those sites’ newsletters and blogs. She writes on a number of topics, including but not limited to geospatial, architecture, engineering and construction. As many technologies evolve and occasionally merge, Susan finds herself uniquely situated to be able to cover diverse topics with facility. « Less

Susan SmithSusan Smith has worked as an editor and writer in the technology industry for over 16 years. As an editor she has been responsible for the launch of a number of technology trade publications, both in print and online. Currently, Susan is the Editor of GISCafe and AECCafe, as well as those sites’ … More »

In the “Utilities and Government” breakout session on Media Day at the Bentley “Year in Infrastructure 2014” event held in London last week, a number of Bentley executives spoke on various aspects of utilities and government, with new developments for 3D cities.

Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2014 Conference, London

The event showcases work being done with Bentley Systems’ software, with presentations by all the Be Inspired Award finalists for the year, topped off by a gala Awards ceremony on Wednesday evening.

Cyndi Smith, senior director of Application Advantage at Bentley, introduced speakers. Aidan Mercer, senior industry marketing manager for Government spoke on “Advancements in Government and Life cycle Management of Infrastructure.” He also spoke about “Advanced BIM for cities,” which includes the various BIM levels used in 3D cities: Level 1: 3D visualization and design; Level 2: performance improvements; Level 3: extending into the operations at the complete asset level and this contributes to a smarter city. He mentioned a really excited finalist in the BE Awards this year, the City of Eindhoven, a city that uses MicroStation, Descartes, ProjectWise, and Navigator in its development of new city infrastructure.

Know What’s Underground

Rachel Rogers, Applications Advantage for Civil, Geospatial, Hydraulics and Hydrology, announced Bentley Subsurface Utility Design and Analysis in OpenRoads will be available in early 2015, and will be a game changer in terms of knowing what’s underground.

The product automatically creates a 3D model and brings together the information needed, provides 3D modeling of all underground utilities, that you can readily update into your GIS database. This gives you a true picture of what’s underground.

One of the highlights is that you have visualization clash detection which can drive construction costs down.

Utility Industry with Cyndi Smith

An industry trend seen recently: convergence. “With the convergence of information technology and operations technology, some projects I’m seeing are bringing in engineering technology,” said Smith.

Better utilities performance catalyzed by:

Drivers and enablers

Smarter networks and technology

Regulations

Economic factors

Organizational evolution

Results better performing utilities infrastructure

American Electric Power (BE Inspired Award winners in the category Advancing Asset Lifecycle Information Management) are using BentleyAssetWise and Bentley Substation to deploy across 11 states, with a transmission network that runs all over the U.S. They use AssetWise in a number of ways, to create their Work Management Systems, create correlation of work orders and object within a design, and allow objects in the design to visually depict their status inside Bentley Substation.

Time Warner Cable, the largest cable TV company in North America (also the BE Award winner in the category Innovation in Utilities and Communications Networks), had 32 different design centers doing design and fiber network in North America, created six engineering hubs, where everyone is designing into these six servers. Network assets are in the GIS in Oracle Spatial and are available to all their operations support systems. They have achieved a first year ROI of 40% and they project 121% over the next 3 years.

Bentley Map and OpenUtilities

Francois Valois, product management, Bentley Map and OpenUtilities, talked about the new release of Bentley Map that brings “information mobility to the forefront with expanded interoperability.”

Advanced point cloud processing so users can create geospatial assets directly from point clouds.

Dynamic cartographic representations

The new release of Bentley Map Mobile improves productivity with redlining and speedy dataset updates. It is a geospatial application that gives you fast access to geospatial data in the field. You can locate assets based on a query of GPS location.

Bentley Map Mobile supports vector geometry attribute and raster backups for large datasets. It also supports iOS, Android and the upcoming Windows platform.

A key announcement is that of the new OpenUtilities products for streamlined design and management of utility networks.

What is OpenUtilities? OpenUtilities is standalone multi-utility GIS and modeling for electric, gas, water and wastewater. This means that it includes MicroStation and Bentley Map, WaterCAD and SewerCAD and supports SysNet. “Our data can be stored in SQL Server Spatial or Oracle Spatial, so people can access the data from any other geospatial package,” said Valois. OpenUtilities Map comes as a suite and is easy to adopt.